President Donald Trump said that a report claiming he asked Attorney General William Barr to hold a press conference saying the president did nothing illegal in his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was false.
“Bill Barr did not decline my request to talk about Ukraine. The story was a Fake Washington Post con job with an anonymous source that doesnt exist,” Trump said in a statement on Nov. 7.
“Just read the Transcript. The Justice Department already ruled that the call was good. We dont have freedom of the press!”
The Department of Justice said in late September, shortly after a whistleblower complaint about the call was beginning to be reported on, that Trump did not violate campaign finance law when he asked Zelensky to look into allegations of corruption by former vice president Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
Biden last year said that in 2016 he threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid from Ukraine unless prosecutor Viktor Shokin was ousted. Shokin was probing Burisma, an energy company that employed Hunter Biden from 2014 to 2019.
“Relying on established procedures set forth in the Justice Manual, the Departments Criminal Division reviewed the official record of the call and determined, based on the facts and applicable law, that there was no campaign finance violation and that no further action was warranted,” Justice Department spokesperson Kerri Kupec said in a statement.
“All relevant components of the Department agreed with this legal conclusion, and the Department has concluded the matter.”
